Comment by xxxyy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xxxyy | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I believe it is possible to set the rules at the real physics level, take 2001: A Space Odyssey as an example. But not if you are forced by Hollywood producers to put all the little pieces that follow inner feelings of the masses. This is what I believe happened to Matrix movies, progressively keeping worse and worse grip on their own rules.

Absolutely, it is possible to claim accuracy, but then you have the hard task of making that actually true. 2001 was better because of that accuracy, but for many movies it's not a good way of doing it. Interstellar could have worked with complete scientific accuracy, or they could simply not have claimed that it was scientific. Either would have been fine.

I agree on the Matrix movies, but they had much more of a free pass already, because the core concepts are so flexible.

To be fair, though, 2001: A Space Odyssey didn't explore nearly as many exotic phenomena as Interstellar did. It was a lot easier for that movie to remain mostly accurate.

2001 explored some pretty darn exotic phenomena, it just didn't both to try to explain them scientifically.

Admittedly it's been some time since I watched the full movie, but I don't recall anything in it, other than the highly abstract ending, that would be considered exotic by today's standards. Maybe they were exotic at the time, but they were still quite well understood at the time of the film's production, whereas the interactions near the singularity of a black hole, say, are very much not understood even at the present day.

Did you have some specific examples in mind? I still feel as though 2001, excluding its ending, stayed much further away from speculative topics of theoretical physics than did Interstellar (which in fact has explicit references, in its dialogue, to "the bulk" -- a term from brane cosmology; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brane_cosmology).

Well, the ending was a big part of what I was referring to. Plus a monolith appears on ancient Earth overnight without disturbing sleeping hominid animals, and somehow teaches them how to use tools. And another monolith that is buried in the moon for millions of years sends a targeted, powerful radio beam at Jupiter.

Maybe 2001 just did a better job than Interstellar of drawing lines for the audience between "known science" and "alien technology so advanced it looks like magic." So that 2001 still has a great reputation for scientific accuracy despite the fact it contains elements at least as fantastic as Interstellar does.

> Maybe 2001 just did a better job than Interstellar of drawing lines for the audience between "known science" and "alien technology so advanced it looks like magic."

That is true, but it is not enough. A lot of Interstellar criticism comes from the fact that events described as scientifically feasible were in fact not. I will not describe what particular problems can be found in Interstellar because other posts in this thread already touched virtually every possible issue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com